The impact of large language models on job interviews, from both sides

The Financial Times had an interesting article (paywalled) recently about the impact of artificial intelligence on recruitment:

Students applying for graduate jobs this summer can take advantage of a new personal interview coach. If they send over a specific job description they can receive tailored interview questions and answers — and feedback on their own responses — all for free.

The coach, offered by the job search engine Adzuna, is not human but an artificial intelligence bot known as Prepper. It can generate interview questions for more than 1mn live roles at large companies, in industries ranging from technology and financial services to manufacturing and retail.

For a graduate job in PwC’s actuarial practice, the chatbot spits out questions such as: “What skills do you think an actuarial consultant should have?” and “How would you explain actuarial concepts to a client who is not from a finance background?”. When a user answers a question, Prepper generates a score out of 100, and tells them which parts worked well and what was missing.

Prepper is part of a new wave of chatbots powered by generative AI — from ChatGPT to Bard and Claude.

As I noted in my previous post, employers are trying to overcome an adverse selection problem. Job candidates know whether they are high quality or not, but employers do not. High-quality job candidates use signalling to reveal to employers that they are high quality, as I noted in my previous post. Employers use screening to try to identify the quality of job candidates. One screening tool is the job interview. Candidates' likely quality as employees is revealed through the job interview process. However, if AI is prepping job candidates, then that reduces the efficacy of the screening process. If low-quality job candidates can be effectively prepped to seem like they are high-quality job candidates, the screening process fails to solve the adverse selection problem.

On the other hand:

Grace Lordan, an economist at the London School of Economics and director of The Inclusion Initiative, which studies diversity in corporate settings, says companies, particularly technology groups, are experimenting with generative AI to conduct initial interviews.

“One of the biggest areas of bias is actually the interview,” she says. “This is when people’s affinity bias, or representative bias, which means choosing people who look like others in the organisation, comes in.”

AI-conducted interviews could go some way to removing that bias, she says. “Generative AI is quite convincing as an avatar. Using AI as another serious data point will allow pushback from the machines [against human bias].”

So, perhaps there are offsetting benefits of AI on the job interview process, if the AI is being used by the employer. If AI leads to job interviews that are more effectively able to screen for high-quality job candidates, by reducing bias in the interview process, then that can be a good thing. The AI might also be better able to ask the searching questions that distinguish high-quality and low-quality job candidates.

Of course, that assumes that the AI is interviewing a human job candidate. What happens when a job candidate, being interviewed by an AI job interviewer, is being given real-time prompts on how to answer by an AI chatbot? Or, in a Zoom job interview, the job candidate simply replaces themselves with an avatar or a 'deep fake' video of themselves generated in real time, and using an AI-scripted voiceover. If it hasn't happened already, it is going to be happening soon. Will that be the death of the job interview as a screening tool? Time will tell.